To the woods, 'to live deliberately'

One man retreats from the world; one compromises

David Guterson's other novels are ''Snow Falling on Cedars,'' ''East of the Mountains,'' and ''Our Lady of the Forest.'' (ALAN BERNER)

The Other
By David Guterson
Knopf, 256 pp., $24.95

Meet Neil Countryman.

You have met his type in fiction before.

He's an ordinary guy, but he has passed through the orbit of a character who is bigger, brighter (or darker), and surely more intense than anyone he has ever met. Think of Nick Carraway recounting the last days of his ambitious friend in "The Great Gatsby" or Ishmael watching Ahab hurl harpoons at fate in "Moby-Dick."

This is not to suggest that "The Other," the new novel from David Guterson, author of "Snow Falling on Cedars," is some sort of instant classic. In truth, it's much like its narrator, quiet and a bit predictable, but solid and steady in its strengths, honest and humane in its insights, the kind of novel that you'll be glad to spend time with and the kind that will reward you for the time you spend.

Neil Countryman's force of nature is John William Barry. They meet on a high school track. Both are loners, outsiders, others. Both love long-distance running and hiking in the Cascade Mountains. So they become friends. But Neil will outgrow the isolation of adolescence. John William is headed for the loner's hall of fame.

Though he's heir to a fortune, John William decides, halfway through college, to run away from his family, retreat to the mountains, and live alone. (You may be reminded of the real-life Chris McCandless, hero of Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild.") When he eventually dies in a wilderness cave, John William leaves his inheritance to his only friend. This makes Neil "the nineteenth richest person in Washington State." And so Neil, by now a high school English teacher who has put in "three decades as an unpublished writer," decides to write the story of his friend.

The narrative bends easily in the breeze that blows between Neil's middle age and the boys' youth. Sometimes other characters appear to tell parts of the story that Neil could not have witnessed. Cue John William's only girlfriend, then bring on the artistic, selfish, high-strung mother and the father who is as accomplished in the world as he is ineffectual at home. Sometimes Neil lets these characters speak for themselves, and sometimes he takes over their narratives, adding writerly details and motivations. It's a convenient device, but Neil needs all the help he can get to answer the questions that haunt him: Why did John William choose the life he did, the road less traveled by? And why did Neil choose the more conventional path to happiness, the path that, as the poem says, has made all the difference?

Yes, the novel abounds in cultural references, from Robert Frost to Hitchcock's "Psycho." It will also help if you've read "The Gnostic Gospels" by Elaine Pagels, because gnosticism figures in whatever cosmology motivates John William. Of course, Guterson never bothers to elucidate gnosticism, as if to mirror the intellectual arrogance of John William himself.

But don't read this book for explosions of drama or plot complications to keep you guessing. John William's decision to drop out appears as no more than a fit of youthful rebellion against a world that has not bothered to understand him. It's the sort of thing that kids his age always dream of doing. Once he retreats to his cave, the outcome is inevitable. Neil will visit periodically, bringing food, dope, books. They will play chess and talk. And John William will decline physically and mentally, slipping steadily toward death.

About halfway through, a private detective appears, hired by the family to find John William. But Neil keeps his friend's whereabouts secret. So the detective just goes away. A different storyteller might have made more of such a character, might have used him as an object of dread more dramatically tangible than the existential void that John William and Neil discuss between tokes in the cave.

But Guterson is not writing that kind of story. He's offering something more contemplative. You feel it in the sentences themselves. Sometimes they are no more than subject, predicate, and object, simple expressions of the endless rhythm of life's quotidian details. Sometimes they are as complex and convoluted as the thought processes of John William himself. And Guterson's ability to capture his characters through the rhythms of his prose may be the greatest skill he displays here.

The final revelations about John William will not surprise you, nor will they fully answer the questions that Neil has been asking, but they will elicit pity and a bit more understanding of the flawed souls who inhabit this world.

The ordinary guy makes his compromises and survives, while John William, like Gatsby and Ahab, does not. But Gatsby and Ahab die striving in the sunlight. John William deteriorates in a dark cave. You may not relish a voyage into his lonely world, but take it, because you'll have Guterson's prose to carry you and a Countryman to bring you back.

Novelist William Martin is the author, most recently, of "The Lost Constitution" (2007).